


Strange Attraction

by glittersnipe



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Drug Abuse, M/M, Mental Illness, generally this is just dark as hell, gratuitous use of pseudo-intellectualism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:01:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittersnipe/pseuds/glittersnipe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you save someone's life, you're bound to them. (Or: it's amazing how you never knew you could be this angry all the time.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Attraction

The first thing he notices about the hospital is how clean it is. Clean and bright, with large airy windows, soothing pastel walls, lots of shining glass and high ceilings and a quiet constant murmur that never quite spikes into sound. It’s calm. Nathan entered it on February 22nd, just a week shy of his seventeenth birthday, with his wrists still shredded and torn, the healing wounds hidden beneath layers of clean white gauze. His black coat standing out too harshly against the washed-out pink of the intake room, where he’s searched and his shoelaces are removed. When he closes his eyes in the sunlight, he sees darkness shot through with red veins. His mother cried and clung to him. He wanted to tell her to stop, to stop crying for him, that he doesn’t deserve her pity or her love. He’s dirty. He’s so dirty. And the hospital around him is so clean, and she doesn’t belong here. People like him do.

He digs his fingers into the clean white gauze wrapped around his wrist and watches as dark red spots blossom. Everything here is so sterile and clean and bright, as if shadows don’t exist. He closes his eyes and remembers his own blood running down his fingers, remembers the sick desperate need to take the knife, to hurt, how close he was, how it was so easy to think how much she _deserved_ it. The succulent ripeness of split flesh, the swell and flow of blood. He digs his fingers back into his wrist. He has a room here, and pills, and all he wants is to be clean and bright and airy like the hospital, like everyone _normal_. For a while now, he's been on some combination of drugs he doesn’t care enough about to remember, and he can feel himself getting fuzzier, getting calmer. Greyer. A layer of glass grows between him and everything else. He can’t get erections anymore. But they don’t stop the thoughts, the dreams, the flash of silver in the dark. He slinks like a rat down the corridors, trying to think about something, about anything other than what he wants most. And he presses his fingers into his wrist.

At group therapy, he can barely stand to speak, and he feels, beneath the drugs, something he supposes is fury like the faraway roar of the sea, a dull ache and resentment, because he can’t bring himself to give much of a fuck about people’s issues with fucking _anger_ and _self control_ and _self loathing_ because that’s normal, everyone has a temper, but he’d like to see any of these people try to deal with needing to hurt someone just to get off. And what the fuck is wrong with him, anyway, why is it so important to him – he’s a rational human being, he cannot believe he would put his need to get off above someone else’s life. When he thinks like this, he can almost believe he’s going to get better, can almost believe he can be normal and happy one day instead of sick and twisted – but then it’s night and darkness comes creeping in the window and he thinks about writhing bodies, twisted in pain, and he knows if he could get hard he would, and then the despair. He starts showering obsessively, in a pathetic attempt to feel cleaner, just once, but it doesn’t work – of course it doesn’t, nothing does; death, he’s convinced, is the only thing that would, that could have saved him, but even that was taken away from him.

He’s taken to thinking a lot about Spencer Reid.

The first time he saw Dr Reid, nervous and earnest, (badly) delivering a lecture on criminal psychology. His hands fluttering birdlike as he talked about how he understood the sick and the twisted like Nathan. The aura he had, the kindness he emanated. Nathan has met very few people he’d characterise as being kind. When he’d seen Dr Reid on the street, loping along in tweed and clean Converse, the sunlight playing off his hair, and seen very clearly that this man was his last chance. Blurry foamy memories of pain and blood and hands holding his wrists down, sandy-blonde hair hanging in his face, Dr Reid’s voice, gone high with panic shouting, and how he’d thought, god, let me die, just let me die.

He focuses on Dr Reid a lot, to try and distract himself from the bad thoughts, trying to remember exactly his flat Nevada drawl, his hazel eyes, the way he’d tuck his too-long hair behind his ear. The way he smelt. His kind, kind eyes. He focuses on Dr Reid desperately, as a kind of talisman, proof that someone believes he can beat this. He’s the only good thing Nathan can think about. The kindest eyes he’d ever seen. He finds himself thinking one day that Dr Reid looks a little like he’d always imagined angels looked like, as a kid. Ethereal. Clean. Pure. He feels good, thinking about Dr Reid, how clean and bright he is, not like the whores he’d followed on the street, walking cunts with bodies attached, rats, vermin (dirty, like him, like him). Not like them. Ethereal and clean. A kind of St Jude for the sick and dirty like him – the painful pressure of Dr Reid’s hands on his wrists, of how he’d magically come to save him. Like an angel. The only person who’d help someone like _him_. He begins to anchor himself on these thoughts.

But then, at night, he thinks about Dr Reid’s hands, slippery with blood, pressing him into the bed, the weight of his thighs as he straddled Nathan’s body, his angelic face close to Nathan’s, his heat and weight and breath and voice, and he knows that Dr Reid is not an angel or a saint, that he’s a person, and that he very much wants to hurt Dr Reid. He thinks of Dr Reid’s butterfly mouth grimacing in agony. He thinks about holding Dr Reid’s wrists down, pressing him into a mattress, making him writhe and scream, covered in his own blood. About dragging knives down those long legs. In the morning he digs his fingers into his wrists. In the morning he feels despair, and each morning, he thinks it can’t get any worse than this, that today he’s going to change, that he at least won’t think about Dr Reid, but then at night the shadow falls like always and he thinks about Dr Reid’s face as the blade slides beneath his ribs.

The days drag by here, each the same, crystallised in amber, until date and time have no meaning. It becomes his favourite fantasy. He tries to convince himself that he’s obsessing about Dr Reid because he hasn’t seen him in a month, because he probably won’t see him while he’s in the hospital, that this kind of attachment is relatively normal, for someone like him, in this situation (normal has ceased to really mean anything), that someday he’ll get out of here and he’ll go see Dr Reid and then he’ll realise that he’s worshipping an idol. He’ll realise he’s not really in love with Dr Reid, because people like him aren’t capable of love, because his love is death and pain and fear. And Dr Reid will be safe. Because he doesn’t want to hurt him, he wants him to be happy, because that’s what people in love want.

But _oh_ at night he wants to hurt him more than anything he’s ever wanted.

He doesn’t think he’s going to get better.

+

After three months, Dr Reid comes to visit him, the only visitor he’s had aside from his mom. Nathan’s reading a book listlessly, trying to read a book but really just watching the clouds outside, when he hears a throat being cleared behind him, and then that Nevada drawl he’s thought about for so long:

“Nathan?”

He jumps and whips around, almost falling out of his chair, and there he is. There’s Dr Reid, standing in front of him and smiling nervously, the sunshine through the windows sparking off his hair, his cardigan pulled down past his wrists to his knuckles, his watch glinting over the left sleeve. His hair longer. Lips bitten.

He looks beautiful. And this is when Nathan realises exactly how fucked he is, because all he wants to do is hold down this man, the only person who believes in him, who knows _what he is_ and still comes to visit him, and make him scream with pain. This man sitting next to him and asking him these nice, normal questions, like how’s the food, and have you made any friends here, and do you want anything, I could get you books if you want, or paper, whatever you want, Nathan. Whatever I can do to help.

You could have helped by letting me die, Dr Reid, and then I wouldn’t be sitting here fantasising about pulling your hair til your lovely long throat with all its veins and arteries is exposed, just for me. I wish you’d let me die. I wish you’d let me hurt you. I wish I knew what good love was, so I could love you like that.

But instead he just responds to Dr Reid’s questions with monosyllables and tries to smile as best he can, but he just feels numb and sad and beaten, like nothing in this fucking world can help him just stop being like this, and then he feels tears slip down his cheek, and he ducks his head. It’s the first time he’s cried since he got here, and now he can’t seem to stop, and he says, sorry, I’m sorry, I just –

– It’s okay, Dr Reid says. It’s okay. And then there’s a shift and he’s kneeling in front of the sofa, looking up at Nathan, forcing him to make eye contact. He holds Nathan’s hands, still looking at him, and says, It’s okay, it’s okay.

– It’s not. It’s not okay, Nathan says, and that’s all he can say, over and over, hiccupping and gasping between sobs, it’s not okay, it’s not okay, he’s not okay, until Dr Reid slides his arms around Nathan’s shoulders and pulls him in close. He rests his head on Dr Reid’s shoulder, wraps his arms around his waist, and just cries and cries and cries. Dr Reid’s hair is soft, is in his eyes, and the wool of his cardigan is wet from Nathan’s tears, and Nathan can smell him, feel the heat of his body, the solidity of him, and if he could he’d probably have a hard-on right now, and then the Bad Thoughts would start again, and he can’t stop crying. The skin of Dr Reid’s neck looks so soft.

Dr Reid holds him until he stops, and then he looks at him, in the eyes (he can’t even look at himself anymore), and says, Nathan, it’s okay. You’re going to get better. I believe it, I really do.

That night, Nathan tries his best to jerk off, and cries instead.

+

“We don’t have to talk, you know. I’m happy to sit here.”  
“...”  
“...”  
“... I’m sorry. This must be really boring for you.”  
“It’s okay, Nathan. I really don’t mind.”  
“I really appreciate this, Dr Reid.”  
“You can call me Spencer.”  
“...”

+

Dr Reid’s visits are the only good thing. It’s the only time he feels anywhere near normal. Human. All else is greyness and an endless uphill struggle.

+

“Positivism refers to a set of epistemological perspectives and philosophies of science which hold that the scientific method is the best approach to uncovering the processes by which both physical and human events occur. It was invented by Auguste Comte. Its basic thesis is that empirical, observable evidence is the only path to knowledge, and controversially it held that all human nature was understandable via the scientific method.”  
“...”  
“Basically, the idea that if you were to study people enough, you could create scientific formulae that would always predict exactly how people would behave. No deviations.”  
“Does it work?”  
“It’s been largely discredited now. Luckily, or I’d be out of a job, I suppose. When I was your age, I thought – well, I was aware it was absurd, but I used to kind of wish it was true.”  
“...Why?”  
“Because it would have made things so much easier – if you could refer to formulae, and understand people like mathematics. But it’s the unpredictable variables that make people human.”  
“...”  
“I suppose what I’m saying is that nothing is set in stone.”

+

It’s been over a year now, and he’s almost gotten used to the drugs, how everything’s less vivid, less real. He’s used now to considering his hands as someone else’s. Being stupid and dull. His voice isn’t his own.

+

“Nobody here understands. I try and try but nobody understands. I think I’d prefer it if I was anyone else in this hospital. I’d rather be anyone else in the world.”  
“...”  
“I’m sorry. You probably don’t know what that’s like.”  
“Of course I do, Nathan. Of course I do.”

+

Dr Reid visits him for a year, at least once a month, and then he suddenly stops. Nathan doesn’t know what he did wrong. He dreams about him sometimes, about the pressure on his wrists like handcuffs. When you save someone’s life, you’re bound to them – Dr Reid is bound to him now, he knows it. There’s a thin red thread connecting them forever. There’s a life-debt. He’s Dr Reid’s, now; Dr Reid is his. He knows Dr Reid thinks so too. Spencer. Spencer Reid. His. A sort of latter-day St Jude, patron saint of misfits and lost causes like him. He dreams about him, dreams which are sometimes warm and white and sometimes dark and red and full of screams, and he wakes up covered in sweat, with his hand down his pants. He’s too exhausted to be ashamed.

He hears all these sweet love songs on the radio, _you to me are sweet as roses in the morning_ or some sentimental shit like that, and he wants to be able to think like that. Normal brain psychology, no crossed wires. And sweet roses and peaches, I want to hold your hand, well, when he’s honest with himself – it’s just so _boring_. And that’s one thing he isn’t. One thing Dr Reid isn’t. And he shouldn’t be thinking this, it’s wrong and bad and sick, but it’s so hard to be good, to be normal, when all the drugs are doing is dulling him, dulling his body and his mind but not erasing the urges.

+

“Do you think I’m evil.”  
“I don’t believe in evil. I believe in people.”

+

He thinks Dr Reid was wrong, for once. He doesn’t think he can change. But what’s scaring him more, now, is that he’s not sure how much he wants to, anymore. It’s so hard.

He thinks about Dr Reid’s pulse flickering and fading. He feels abandoned. He feels angry, but he is so, so in love. Still. Whatever sick version of love he’s capable of feeling.

+

“The basis of morality, as far as I’m concerned, is empathy. It can all be boiled down to the question: _would you like it if I did that to you?_ I know it’s hard. It’s a skill most people don’t develop until well into adulthood, if at all.”  
“You’re the only person who visits me here, aside from my mom.”  
“I enjoy visiting you.”  
“Do you think people like me are capable of love?”  
“As much as anyone else is, yes. I do think so.”

+

It’s two years later, and he’s nineteen, and he’s leaving the hospital. He’s going to find St Jude, and then – then he doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

2.

_Dear Gideon,_

_Mathematics is our language for expressing physical realities. It governs everything, even that which we like to think is a unique invention – namely, human beings. The golden mean governs us, controls everything from our attractiveness to the length of our fingers. Did you know, fractals recur (ha) everywhere in nature – even our lungs are fractal systems. I find it unspeakably beautiful that our lungs are like snowflakes, or Sierpinski gaskets. We are controlled everywhere by laws we barely understand, but which obey logic._

_Bernard Sapoval deduced another advantage of the fractal character of the circulatory system: "the fractal structure of the human circulatory system damps out the hammer blows that our heart generates. The heart is a very violent pump, and if there were any resonance in blood circulation, you would die.”_

_In other words, if we could feel the true force of our hearts, we would die. Draw whatever conclusions you want from this._

_Spencer._

_+_

_Dear Gideon,_

_Do you know what a Menger sponge is? It’s a fractal curve which has infinite surface area, but encloses zero volume._

_I feel a lot like that, sometimes – infinite surface area, infinite sensations, information chaos, bombardment, but nothing inside. I doubt Menger would appreciate me anthropomorphosising his mathematical concepts, but it can’t be helped. Normal people project onto other things, I’m sure._

_I said in my last letter that logic governs everything. It was something I clung to as a teenager, the idea that there’s a consistency in everything, that these other creatures around me who looked like me and talked like me were not acting arbitrarily, as it seemed – and, I admit, sometimes still seems – and that there was a system to crack. And that once I understand the system, I would have friends. I did learn, too, but now I use this system to understand why people rape and beat and murder, and I’m no better at making friends. I wonder what this makes me._

_And sometimes, people have broken logic, faulty circuits, get caught into the recursive loop of repeating the same act, again and again, expecting a difficult result and creating pain. Recursion, with murder, with drugs, with pain, with fear – sometimes it seems the human talent for recursion is itself recursive. History being cyclical, as some argue. Sometimes the membrane between Self and Other grows so thin, they cannot distinguish the two anymore, and they end up in a sanatorium in Nevada with a son too scared to go and see them._

_I think, were heaven a physical reality, it would be an expression of purest logic. A place where systems don’t break. Where infinities become rational truths. Where people don’t crack. Where people don’t spend their nights writing letters that will never be posted to men long since gone._

_I visited Nathan Harris today. I hope recursive loops are not as dominant in our nature as they seem to be._

_Spencer._

_+_

_Dear Gideon,_

_A life-debt is a relatively recent phenomenon in western culture (though it does occasionally occur in non-western culture). The most famous example is Jesus Christ; all humanity owe him a life-debt (although Garcia tells me the most famous example she can think of is from Harry Potter, which I should really read soon to see what all the fuss is about)._

_Nathan is the one who told me about them. He says it’s like a thread that binds two people together. I told him he didn’t owe me anything._

_I feel uneasy about how he looks at me sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to stop visiting him, to let the past rest, and to give him a chance at breaking the strange loop of the self, of finding something better. Sometimes, I wonder if I should have let him die. Sometimes I think he thinks I should._

_I wish there was an instruction manual on this kind of thing – on everything. It feels so fragile and ridiculous, to rely only on my own moral compass for this. But I see how he digs his fingers into his wrists, and I remember the feel of his blood, and I think maybe it’s the other way around – that having saved his life, I now owe him a debt. I am responsible._

_Spencer_

_+_

_Dear Gideon,_

_There’s a Victorian invention called a lachrymatory. The idea is that you use it to collect the tears of mourners at a funeral. Some of them had a special fastening which allowed the tears to evaporate; when all liquid was gone, it signified the time to stop mourning. With others, you sealed your tears and poured them onto the grave a year later._

_Spencer_

_+_

_Dear Gideon,_

_dx/dt=delta*(y-x)_  
dy/dt=r*x-y-x*z  
dz/dt=x*y-b*z 

_These are equations for the Lorenz Attractor, a non-linear three-dimensional system. It is, among other things, a simplified weather model - a looping, weaving object that never intersects itself. The system never repeats._

_I am hesitant to find morals in mathematics, but the message here appears to be that no matter how simple the system, chaos always results._

_Chaotic systems exhibit something known as strange attraction. Strange attraction occurs when non-integer dimensions exist. Non-integers bring us to the Hausdorff dimension. Which brings us back to fractals – sets with non-integer Hausdorff dimensions – which brings us back to nature, and lungs, and snowflakes._

_Nathan and I are a chaotic system. We exhibit strange attraction._

_Benoît Mandelbrot observed that fractals, sets with noninteger Hausdorff dimensions, are found everywhere in nature. He observed that the proper idealization of most rough shapes you see around you is not in terms of smooth idealized shapes, but in terms of fractal idealized shapes: “clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”_

_And yet, despite these perfect laws, entropy is what defines the universe. Holding out for ideal, or perfect, is a waste of time. Every system breaks eventually. We see mostly rough shapes, but sometimes I can see fractals in Nathan. Does this make sense?  
Spencer_

_+_

_Dear Gideon,_

_It’s been awhile._

_Dilaudid is composed mainly of dihydromorphinone, a type of hydrochloride which is a very potent centrally-acting analgesic drug of the opioid class. It is a derivative of morphine – to be specific, a hydrogenated ketone thereof._

_In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that there is no more horrible state than solipsism. There are seven main propositions in the text:_

_1\. The world is everything that is the case._  
2\. What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.  
3\. A logical picture of facts is a thought.  
4\. A thought is a proposition with sense.  
5\. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.  
6\. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: .  
7\. Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence. 

_I often find that the things whereof one cannot speak are those which cannot be passed over. Are the most important things. I cannot form a logical picture of facts relating to the circumstances in which I found myself dying tied to a chair, in a cabin, in a cemetery, at the age of 25. I cannot find any propositions with sense relating to it. There is, therefore, no true thought relating to this act, and therefore I cannot speak about it. And so_

_+_

_Dear Gideon,_

_I think I was talking about solipsism in my last letter. Wittgenstein was wrong. It’s the easiest way to live. Nobody to interfere with you. You try and you try, and people just inflict more and more pain, and it becomes the only form of preservation._

_We’re all solipsists at heart, anyway; we all do what we do for selfish reasons, and reap the benefits only as it relates to ourselves. The team are trying to ‘take care of me’, which means they watch me to ease their consciences, so they can go home and sleep at night. And nobody has a fucking clue. There’s a kind of vicious pleasure in that._

_Chaos theory is itself something of a paradox because it attempts to impose order on what is by definition the disruption of order. We’re ringed with chaos. A butterfly flaps its wings and n another world, I die. A wave breaks in another world, and somebody else is able to figure out where I am before I have to fucking tell them myself. In another world, people actually care instead of going through the motions. Human contact has always been lauded as the only escape from the box of bone that is your own head, but whoever thinks that has never--_

_How can I expect help from people who can’t even keep up? Does this sound arrogant? I don’t care. Look where trying to be selfless got me._

_Spencer._

_+_

_gideon_

_there is a paradox proposed by russell that is the case of the barber that shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves the question is who shaves the barber_

_as an antimony this is fairly simple much like russells laughable argument about christianity which relies on the gambler’s fallacy who couldnt figure that one out by themselves anyway_

_the barber paradox becomes infinitely more interesting when we interpret it via derrida first and then take that conclusion further via hegel  
for example if we posit that we ourselves are the act of thinking and no more as derrida did which seems more and more realistic but anyway then we can say we are the barber and we think all and only those who do not think themselves and then we get into serious antimony_

_we think all things which do not think themselves and these things are therefore other and not self_

_but then if we think about ourselves with respect to the game we’re thinking about our own thinking, and we cant do that because the object of our thinking has to be other we can think only things which do not think ourselves_

_so if we think ourselves were conceiving ourselves as thought we cannot be the object of our thinking_

_but if we cant think ourselves that means we ourselves are things that cannot think themselves and are therefore other and are proper objects for our thought as we fulfil these conditions_

_so if we can think ourselves, we can’t_

_and if we can’t, we can_

_conclusion: everything is fucking impossible  
+_

_gideon_

_“please ignore this sign”_

_pinnochio says my nose will grow_

_the curve of a circles circumference decreases as the circles size increases, and the limit of decrease is a straight line_

_would the modern interpretation of zeno be morgan and the turtle i wonder_

_if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment the flying arrow is therefore motionless much as when i am flying through space on 4,5-α-epoxy-3-hydroxy-17-methyl morphinan-6-one and still lying on my bathroom floor motionless_

_routes include: oral, intramuscular, intravenous, subcutaneous, intranasal, rectal, sublingual, transmucosal, buccal, transdermal (experimental) please enjoy your flight and observe all regulations for your own safety and the safety of those around you_

_your mission is not to accept this mission do you accept_

_+_

_gideon  
i wish you were here i think im feeling the true force of my heart for the first time_

3.

The sun slants through the city, bouncing off the mirrored buildings. They’re too bright to look at directly. Spencer is sitting outside the public library, but he’s not certain when he got here, or why he’s here. Books, he supposes. His hands are shaking, and it’s sunny, but he’s cold, even though he’s wearing at least three sweaters. He doesn’t feel like moving, possibly ever again. It’s maybe eleven am, but he forgot his watch, and his bag – he hopes he has his keys, at least. There’s not many people around on Saturday morning. He supposes people are sleeping off their hangovers. The team had invited him out last night, with condescendingly kind voices, soft eyes. Like he couldn’t fend for himself anymore, which he’s doing just fine, thanks, he thought the fact he was still alive was proof enough of that.

“Take care of yourself,” Morgan had said, as they left, and Spencer had nodded tightly and bit back his reply: _I’ve been doing that since I was six, thanks._

Then he’d gone home and gotten high, and the rest of the night’s a bit of a blur, and now he’s here. He can’t remember the last time he slept, or ate. Heroin users are among the least likely drug-users to develop psychosis. Silver lining there, he supposes. His brain’ll be mush, but at least it will be a different kind of mush to his mother’s. There’s a young man in a black coat watching him across the street. He closes his eyes. The sun turns his eyelids red. He’s suddenly so, so tired; wonders how he’ll get home, decides he doesn’t really care.

Someone taps him on the shoulder, and he opens his eyes blearily, too high to even be scared.

“...Nathan?”

“Spencer? Are you okay?”

“Um,” Spencer says, and rubs his eyes. _Pull it together_ , he thinks. _God, just fuck off and leave me alone. I just want everyone to leave me alone._

“Are you okay? You look really sick.”

“...Yes. I’m sick.” He keeps his eyes closed. He knows this is not the appropriate conversation: the appropriate question is to ask how the hell Nathan Harris found him, what Nathan wants – he wonders, briefly, if he’s maybe not just hallucinating, if this is the first stage in his by now almost inevitable descent into madness. He can feel Nathan getting closer to him and his skin prickles. He wants to tell Nathan to watch his fucking personal space, to leave him alone, to get away from him. He spends so much of his life dealing with people needing to touch him because they’re too fucking selfish to realise maybe he doesn’t want to be touched. He’s so sick of people.

“Are you okay? I’ll call a cab, okay?” He can feel Nathan’s breath and his cheek and feels briefly revolted. Part of the reason he likes the Dilaudid is the ethereal feeling it gives him, of finally being freed from his gangly, awkward, blood-and-bone body; now, Nathan is ruining it. He nods. He doesn’t give much of a fuck either way. He wonders if the sun’s gone behind the clouds, or if he just needs another hit. And then he’s being bundled into a taxi. Nathan asks him his address several times before he can remember it, and he hears Nathan having an argument with the driver (“not a junkie, he’s _sick_ ,” he thinks he hears, and that’s kind of funny the same way being given drug-store heroin by a psychopath as an act of kindness is funny, the same way riding in a car with a potential murderer is funny). And then they’re driving away, and Nathan’s arm is tangled in his own and the window’s cool against his cheek. The cabbie’s got the radio on too loud, it’s some shitty pop song he doesn’t recognise – _I like it like it come on, come on, come on, sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me_

He opens his eyes and Nathan’s watching him. He’s still too close.

“What,” he says blearily.

“I missed you,” Nathan says. His voice is still breathy, uncertain. “Why did you stop coming?” His fingers skate down Spencer’s jacket sleeve, and linger at his wrist.

“I...” Spencer says, and then he laughs because this is possibly the most ridiculous situation he’s ever been in. What is the correct answer in this situation? “I can’t really explain here, Nathan.”

Nathan’s visibly shocked by the state of Spencer’s apartment. It smells rancid and dank, and all the curtains are closed. Eddies of dust whirl in the air. Strange attraction. Some of his piles of books have fallen over and lie scattered across the floor. He’s pretty certain the dishes in the sink have begun growing mold.

He collapses onto the sofa and closes his eyes again, wishes Nathan would leave. He’s sweating hard and everything’s starting to hurt.

“The cab driver was right, wasn’t he,” Nathan says.

“Yes,” Spencer says, because why the fuck lie anymore. “Entropy is the reigning force in the universe, you know.”

“What?”

“Entropy is the measure of disorder in a given system. Chaos. All systems will eventually become chaos.”

“Spencer.”

“I was kidnapped by a psychopath who, in order to alleviate the suffering he himself inflicted on me, injected me with dihydromorphinone, also known as Dilaudid, also known as drug-store heroin.”

“And you’re still using it?”

“Addiction is one of many forms of recursion. A particularly human talent.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nathan, what are you even doing here?” He wishes he could care more, he really does.

“I wanted to know why you stopped coming to see me.”

His eyes are closed again, but he can feel Nathan shifting closer to him. He opens his eyes. Nathan is staring at him again, his face inches from Spencer’s.

His fingers curl around Spencer’s wrists, applying pressure. His mouth ghosts up Spencer’s throat.

“I stopped seeing the fractals,” Spencer says, and allows himself to be kissed.

+

“I never thought I could be this angry all the time. I never realised how hard it is to stop falling, once you’ve started.”

Nathan slides his hand up Spencer’s wrist, his fingers ghosting over the bruises and pitmarks on his inner elbow. He rests his hand on the marks, lightly. Spencer is staring at the ceiling.

“Capgras syndrome,” Spencer says, slurring, high again, “is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person holds the delusion belief that they are dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost their blood or internal organs.”

Nathan digs his fingers into the marks, experimentally. Spencer’s breathing sharpens, but he gives no other indication that he’s even aware Nathan is there. He leans in, presses his lips to Spencer’s sharp jaw, feels the tickle of a pulse.

“I think it sounds quite nice,” Spencer says.

Nathan pulls out the knife.

+

A/N: the Derrida/Hegel intepretation of the barber antimony is cribbed from David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. Boy oh boy but writing from the perspective of a drug-addled genius is hard. The rest of the paradoxes are stolen from pretty much everywhere. Lyrics are from “Concrete and Clay” by Unit 4+2, and “S&M” by Rihanna (lolling forever but it seemed appropriate).


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